swissmiss is a design blog and studio run by Tina Roth Eisenberg, a 'swiss designer gone NYC'.

The ‘Busy’ Trap

“Idleness is not just a vacation, an indulgence or a vice; it is as indispensable to the brain as vitamin D is to the body, and deprived of it we suffer a mental affliction as disfiguring as rickets. The space and quiet that idleness provides is a necessary condition for standing back from life and seeing it whole, for making unexpected connections and waiting for the wild summer lightning strikes of inspiration — it is, paradoxically, necessary to getting any work done.”

I love this quote and agree wholeheartedly with it but have a bit of an issue with the practicality of the whole article.

I sincerely doubt majority of people struggling to survive paycheck to paycheck these days have the ability to escape to an undisclosed location. I’d much rather advocate for finding moments in the day where one discovers their passion and applies their drive to it.

Entrepreneurship requires both passion and a 24/7 schedule dedicated to that passion. I say be busy living your passions not escape from the reality around you. :)

Reminds me of noted social psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. In his book Creativity, he writes about the virtues of idle time and quotes physicist Freeman Dyson: “I am fooling around not doing anything, which probably means that this is a creative period… I think that it is very important to be idle. I mean they always say that Shakespeare was idle between plays.”

Thomas Edison apparently did most of his “inventing” sitting in a chair; he would let him self drift, just this side of being asleep, with a small rubber ball in his hands. The ball would fall and wake him if he slept, and he did this because he found that in this unstructured time, he was able to come up with his many ideas for inventions which he then spent long hours in the lab trying to build.